Peter Schiff is the King of Wealth Destruction: Image of the Month

Some things never change, like Peter Schiff's fear mongering, broken clock sales pitch, and his terrible fund performance. 

See Blast from the Past: Pathetic Performance of Peter Schiff's Mutual Funds

Ever since Schiff launched his mutual funds at Euro Pacific Capital in 2013, his firm's best-performing fund has returned at shocking 0.00%, versus the S&P 500 Index's 184% return, as of January 19, 2024. ^{1, 2, 3}

That's right. I said 0.00% after ten years, versus the S&P 500 Index's 184%.

Take a look at the chart yourself. 

You can even plot it for yourself and see. 

But it gets worse; much worse.

As you can see, Schiff's worst performing mutual fund is down by nearly 24% over the same time span (around ten years) versus the S&P 500 Index's 184% return. 

How would you feel if you put your money into a fund and checked it ten years later only to see no gains?

Meanwhile, your friend tells you about his 184% return from having bought the S&P 500 Index ten years ago.

Worst of all, you'd have paid huge fees to Schiff for no returns for ten years. 

Therefore, Schiff makes a good deal of money over that ten-year period while you made nothing.  

That's what you call a transfer of wealth, from you to Schiff.  

How would you like to put your money in a fund and after ten years you see a 24% decline?

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 soared by 184% over the same time period. 

That's what you call WEALTH DESTRUCTION if you own the fund.

It's wealth creation  for Schiff, but at your expense. 

Speaking of expense, most investors think a fund's Expense Ratio shows you the full percentage you will be paying to the fund.

As Mike Stathis exposed many years ago, this is not the case.

Many additional fees are not included in the expense ratio.

These additional fees are disclosed in the fund's prospectus.

To get an idea about the kinds of fees investors are paying on top of the expense ratio, take a look at the images below showing excerpts from the fee disclosure portion of the prospectus for one of Schiff's mutual funds from a few years ago.⁴

Again, the fees discussed below are NOT included in the expense ratio.  

Even today, Schiff is still conning people with his ridiculous broken clock, scare tactics. 

He's desperate to do anything to lure people into his terrible mutual funds. 

As usual, he's using dishonest tactics trying to scare people while making wild claims, such as the banks are all going to fail, etc. 

Schiff has a history of this kind of marketing. 

 

Fortunately for Schiff, most people are naive and quite stupid, so they don't bother to check his track record.

If they did, they'd realize Schiff is an investment disaster who makes his money at the expense of others. 

Most people don't even bother to check the performance of Schiff's funds.

They go along with his rhetoric about the "bad" Fed, or other gimmicks intended to lure the main street mindset.  

I think it's safe to conclude that Schiff is a very dishonest, money worshipping con artist. 

That's only an opinion.

His fund's have performed terribly. That's a fact.

But let's not forget the big picture here.

It's the media that gives Schiff a voice.

Without the media, no one would know of Schiff, so no one would lose their a** investing in his mutual funds. 

Instead of airing unbiased experts like Mike Stathis, the people who run the media promote "their own tribe" so as to keep the money "in the family."

These so-called experts aired in the media spread disinformation. This creates more dumb money, which Wall Street loves.  

The media also loves it because the advertisement slots become very valuable. 

You see, at some point many of the suckers who pay attention to the financial media will have unfortunately blown up their investment accounts after having listened to one or more of the media's "experts."

These are the people who are most likely to reach out to Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, insurance companies and fund companies after seeing their advertisements. 

This explains why the financial media continues to promote Schiff despite his terrible track record of wrong predictions and his abysmal fund performance. 

It's all about taking the audience's money and transfering it into the hands of Wall Street (via taking the dumb money in the market) the media (via higher ad dollars) and the so-called "experts" who are now able to sell large numbers of books and pull in new investment customers. 

1 As stated in the past, we have good reason to believe Schiff changed his business model in 2012 from separately managed accounts to mutual funds in order to avoid what was likely to be a slew of lawsuits due to terrible performance and unsuitable investments.   

2 A few years ago Schiff closed down two of his mutual funds (Asia small cap and Latin American funds) due to terrible performance and dwindling assets. He also closed down his firm's U.S. equity mutual fund by around 2014 probably because he was being called a hypocrite and scammer because he was always trashing U.S. stocks but later opened a fund focused on U.S. stocks. We believe Schiff launched a U.S. fund as a way to land some decent performance because his foreign funds were doing poorly.  Check the image below to see Schiff's original mutual funds. 

3 Over the years, it appears that Schiff has reorganized some of his funds, possibly relaunched some and done other things to change the composition and inception date. His first funds were launched in 2012. But this current funds show an inception date in 2013.  See the image in footnote 2.

4 I believe these images are from one of his original mutual funds launched in 2012.